Jorit Agoch is a famous Italian graffiti artist known for his clean style and large-scale, ultra-realistic portrait murals painted on the side of buildings all over the world.
Over the last 16 years, we’ve featured many impressive graffiti artworks, like the mind-boggling optical illusions of Portuguese street artist Odeith, the ingenious portraits of Fabio Gomes Trindade, and the three-dimensional masterpieces of Carlos Alberto GH, just to name a few. However, in terms of realism, few can compare it to the work of Italian street artist Jorit Agoch. Hailing from Quarto, a commune in the Naples metropolitan area, Jorit quickly made a name for himself in the urban art world thanks to his impressively clean style and a degree of realism that is very hard to achieve using spray paint. Today, his awe-inspiring portrait murals can be admired in dozens of cities around the world, from Italy to Russia, the USA, and South America.
Like many other graffiti artists, Jorit Agoch honed his skills at his local train yard, covering the trains there in original artworks, before gradually evolving to murals in the northern suburbs and in the historic center of Naples. His art was exceptional, and it wasn’t long before authorities began inviting him to decorate the facades of various buildings with it.
Jorit became known for painting murals depicting the faces of people with red streaks on their cheeks. Some of the protagonists of his works are everyday people, while others are historical figures, social activists, and even sports personalities.
In 2019, Jorit painted the face of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, on the facade of a twenty-story building in Russia. It is the largest portrait of Gagarin in the world.
Although Jorit Agoch became internationally known for his incredible murals, over the years he became somewhat controversial in the art world due to his political views. For example, he once painted a mural in Naples of Fyodor Dostoevsky, in whose eye is a child in the colors of the Russia-controlled Donetsk People’s Republic and stated that Italy should have been supporting the Russian-backed separatists of the Donbas region in Ukraine since 2014.
Last year, Agoch painted a mural of a girl with the colors of the Russian flag painted in the irises, surrounded by two missiles and with the NATO inscription on the side of a building in the Russia-occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Controversy aside, Jorit Agoch’s graffiti art is on another level, but you have to get up close and personal to really appreciate his attention to detail. Zooming in on some of his most impressive portraits, you can see that he spends time getting every hair follicle and even the skin pores just right.
